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Discovered But Forgotten: Historical Treasures Lost in Museums

A couple of weeks ago, CBS News ran a story about an ancient mummy shroud that was recently discovered — not in Egypt, but in storage in a museum in Scotland.

I vaguely remember once when I was very young hearing someone opine that many of the greatest historical discoveries yet to be announced had already been made — but they were sitting in a warehouse or museum storage somewhere. Like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie.

Just file it to the right of “Aladdin’s Lamp” and to the left of “Aztec Gold”

This certainly does seem to be the case a remarkable amount of the time. While there are no shortage of “traditional,” field discoveries still to be made, there are easily dozens of significant finds, just in the last few years, that have been made by reexamining existing museum collections, or even the structures of the museums themselves. In fact, only a few days ago, on April 16, the remains of five archbishops of Canterbury who had died hundreds of years earlier was discovered beneath a museum in London.

Here are a few more examples of discoveries made in museums:

The remains of an ancient “super croc” were discovered in another museum in Scotland

Not really a “hidden” find, but a 250-year-old Rembrandt sketch was discovered in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Germany. For decades it had been displayed under another artist’s name.

In 2014, a previously undiscovered dinosaur species known as Pentaceratops aquilonius was discovered in storage in a museum in Canada

In 2016, a Mozart score was discovered in the reserve collection in the Czech National Museum. The piece was co-written with Antonio Salieri — the man accused of poisoning Mozart after the composers early death.